Silicon Valley, if you’ve never been, is a deceptively peaceful place. Manicured lawns sporting lush trees laden with blossom border pretty houses flanked by vast car parks, belonging to the thousands of workers who staff the world’s most innovative companies. It’s also one of the few places in the world you can idly watch a driverless car drive by and not even notice.

The arguments in favour for the next generation in automation are clear – no danger of human error, more efficient and environmentally-friendly, huge potential fiscal savings. The flipside: putting our lives in the hands of machines with an ever-present potential to be hacked.

The dozens of visitors to Intel’s newly-opened Autonomous Driving Garage are firmly in the pro rather than fearful camp. Set deep in the heart of the Valley, the chipmaker’s facility is the newest of four outlets, alongside Arizona, Portland and Berlin garages, and is housed in a well-maintained if nondescript building close to fellow tech firms Canon and software giant Oracle.

Autonomous driving in the heart of Silicon Valley (Photo: i)

Given the star roles afforded to the glitzy phone makers and social media firms in tech circles, it’s easy to overlook just how influential Intel has been in terms of advancing computing, given its chips have quietly powered the vast majority of the world’s computers for decades. Now it wants to lead the charge in the next great technical challenge – making cars safe and smart enough to steer themselves.

Regardless of the nay-sayers, today’s attendees have gathered in the 30-degree heat to take a look at the latest autonomous vehicles powered by Intel’s software, including an Audi Q5 which had been overhauled by automotive supplier Delphi to enable driving (mainly) free of human intervention. It’s a bulky but unassuming vehicle, no different from any other standard SUV you’d see driving anywhere in the world. The only difference is the series of subtle cameras, Lidars (which use lasers to measure distance), radars and 26 sensors embedded into the car’s bumper, grill, doors and roof, which collect data to enable the car to ‘see’ its ever-changing surroundings.

The cameras embedded in the roof and side of the vehicle (Photo: i)

Squeezing into the sweltering interior with a couple of other journalists, I had a clear view of the display panel next to the steering wheel, which showed nearby cars and pedestrians, alongside traffic markers, lights and other obstacles. Around 40 seconds into our two-mile route, the emergency driver took his hands off the wheel and let the car weave itself in and out of traffic.

Truthfully, there was no discernible difference between human and machine driving. The car switched lanes confidently and swiftly, slowing for red lights and other vehicles before returning to Intel’s car park.

While the Q5 can only currently drive along routes optimised for its sensors, it’s clear it can drive just as competently and efficiently as a human – if not more so. The same model completed the longest drive an autonomous vehicle has made to date in the US in 2015, clocking up close to 3,400 miles over nine days in the journey from San Francisco to New York – in automated mode for 98 per cent of that time.

The majority of driverless cars have large computers in their boot – Audi’s stores its power out of sight (Photo: i)

The challenge lies in preparing the cars for any number of unexpected scenarios, like registering a human moving abnormally fast because they were standing on a hoverboard, says Jack Weast, chief architect of Intel’s automated driving solutions.

The data generated by driverless vehicles is estimated to be immense – around 4 terabytes every 90 minutes, equivalent to around 68,000 hours worth of music files. In time, Intel hopes to build 5G networking into the car to transfer the information to the cloud.

“We drive test fleet vehicles and collect thousands and thousands of miles of data, which we bring into the data centre. We do everything we can to create algorithms that work for as many kinds of scenarios we can imagine. Just like a human, we don’t need to see every person in the world to be trained to know what a person looks like. It’s the same concept for autonomous vehicles.”

Intel’s research into what it takes to make a human trust a machine has drawn parallels between how humans foster trust in each other, namely open and clear dialogue and the feeling of being responded to, he explains. Extensive ride testing with regular members of the public is also enormously helpful in working out how those outside of the tech-initiated will react to them.

There will always be those who are more frightened than excited by self-driving cars, and understanding the hopes and fears of the everyday passenger is essential if manufactures hope to start marketing driverless software and fully-equipped vehicles by a tentative 2019 deadline, Weast adds. “The technology could be perfect in terms of its self-driving capability, but if we as humans don’t trust the machine, we’re not going to step into it or put our family and friends in it.”

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